Using the GNU Privacy Guard: Agent GENKEY

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#### 2.6.3 Generating a Key

This is used to create a new keypair and store the secret key inside the active PSE — which is in most cases a Soft-PSE. An not yet defined option allows to choose the storage location. To get the secret key out of the PSE, a special export tool has to be used.

       GENKEY

Invokes the key generation process and the server will then inquire on the generation parameters, like:

       S: INQUIRE KEYPARM
       C: D (genkey (rsa (nbits  1024)))
       C: END

The format of the key parameters which depends on the algorithm is of the form:

        (genkey
          (algo
            (parameter_name_1 ....)
              ....
            (parameter_name_n ....)))

If everything succeeds, the server returns the *public key* in a SPKI like S-Expression like this:

         (public-key
           (rsa
     	 (n <mpi>)
     	 (e <mpi>)))

Here is an example session:

       C: GENKEY
       S: INQUIRE KEYPARM
       C: D (genkey (rsa (nbits  1024)))
       C: END
       S: D (public-key
       S: D   (rsa (n 326487324683264) (e 10001)))
       S  OK key created